William Kent 1919 - 2012

William Kent: No Category

In the 1960s William Kent’s works were hailed by the New York Times as “Masterfully rendered and highly refined in technique, they smolder with a timeless power.” Kent’s work was in the 1966 Whitney Biennial and other museum exhibitions. He even invented an entirely new printing medium. But this master sculptor — one of America’s greatest — was soon overlooked and then forgotten. An irascible character, contemptuous of the commercial art world, he disappeared from the New York scene. He chose an ascetic path, living and working in a dairy barn nestled in the rolling hills of Connecticut. A New York Times critic once called him “the world’s greatest living carver of wood; there’s not even anyone close.” His huge and awe-inspiring carved wood sculptures have been compared to those of Brancusi. And his paintings and monoprints push far beyond those of Warhol.

A Carving Artist

A narrow glimpse inside the barn. Crammed with sculptures, the environment is a virtual forest.

This is not the woods, really.

It just seems that way when you enter the low-slung, asbestos-sided cow barn where William Kent sculpts. It could be the swarms of pollen-like sawdust, or the musty, loamy scent, or the forest of seven-foot-tall wood sculptures that seem to sprout from the cement floor like dandelions in a neglected field. The place seems enchanted, which would make Kent, a ninety-two-year-old wood sculptor who has been compared to Brancusi, a kind of Merlin, if he would accept the role.

But the irascible and phenomenally talented Kent is not a mirthful figure. In many ways, he is a bitter one, and if anyone has a right to bitterness, it is he. Entering his seventh decade in wood sculpture, he is an artist who has been overlooked.

"They are fools, these people who run the art world," says Kent, a bald, lithe man who looks like a thin-lipped Picasso with hooded hazel eyes. "They are managerial types, slick politicians, culture vultures. My work doesn't fit into the New York style. Woodcarving is out. It's hard for people to understand that. People think if you're good, you'll sell, you'll make money. That's not true. Not in this country."

William Kent, whom one Massachusetts gallery owner called “the greatest living carver of wood in the world,” crosses his arms emphatically across his narrow chest. He lives alone here, with two cats, and a grove full of six- to seven-foot-tall, elegant sculptures of glowing mahogany, red cedar, poplar and pine. These organic works, from bulging bellies to erotic chickens, laze beneath bare light bulbs in former cow stalls, like fossils in an ancient deciduous civilization. Everywhere one looks there is a buried grace.

“He's brilliant,” says fellow sculptor Marv Beloff of Meriden, who has known Kent since the 1950s. “He’s a philosopher. He is a very deep and very sensitive man who feels very strongly about things. He’s lived a long time and he’s done something that not a lot of people do, which is to think.”

An awe-inspiring density of masterworks

Kent has lived here in this former barn since 1964, carving masterworks of wood sculpture that recall Brancusi, removed from the fickle art world. These astonishing abstract sculptures are études of form and shape. They boggle and offend; caress and cajole. They are at once satirical and seraphic, rapier-like in wit and rhapsodic in tenderness. An unabashed ’60s liberal prone to stinging political invectives, Kent has chiseled more than his share of artistic derision. His sculptures, from his craven Donald Duck, to his erotic Greek odes, are oxymoronic and occasionally obscene. In Bill Kent’s world, small things become big, ordinary things become extraordinary and sacred things become profane.

Sense, No. Ambiguity, Yes.

Here in this cement-floor workshop, giant sugar peas bulge with fertility. Electrical plugs take on an erotic mien and corkscrews as large as a bureau swivel with lubricious energy. A straightedge razor takes on the aura of a mythic instrument and Donald Duck replaces the bald eagle as the talon-toed symbol of our national character. A ladle becomes eroticized and a hot water bottle takes on the gravitas of a military memorial. A giant key slips into the belly of a huge light bulb, another of Kent’s fantastic oxymorons.

“It doesn't make any sense, I know,” says Kent , twisting in his wheelchair and bringing his coarse fingers to his mouth. “Ambiguity, they say, is one of the keys to contemporary art.”

If Kent wanted ambiguity, he went at it in a big way. It is not just the subjects that raise eyebrows in his work, but their enormity and their classic beauty. Kent is surely a contemporary artist who revels in the beauty of the ordinary form, but he is a classicist at heart. All of his work has the finely finished sheen of a Renaissance marble. And Kent, who never married and passes his time playing Rossini on a piano held up by a cinder block and a jack, has something of the monastic about him.

“He’s sort of an ascetic in a way,” said Johnes Ruta, an independent curator from New Haven. “He’s an extremely literate guy. He knows music inside and out. And he knows his art history.”

Hot Water Bottle No.1, 1994; 78 inches, mahogany, red cedar, and pine

But Kent’s prodigious talent has not translated into success in the art world. That has left him bitter and contemptuous, but it has not extinguished his artistic impulse or his intrinsic hopefulness. As engaging as he is censorious, he can be delightfully warm and astringently bitter — often in the scope of five minutes. Kent, who is as agile physically as he is intellectually, has a riveting glance that, like his sculptures, can either pierce with contempt or comfort with warmth. With Kent, who has been called a “curmudgeon,” “recluse,” and “eccentric” you never know which will receive you until he has pulled the lance out from your chest.

He has thrown many potential admirers and inquisitive reporters out of his studio and most people are dismissed as “boobs” or “fools.” His contempt for the art world is vigorous; he is so bitter about past rejections he has received from major galleries that he has not only kept the rejection letters; he has annotated them. “Too shiny,” they said. “Too satirical.”
“Too big.” “Unsalable.” And the best: a rejection that came with an apology for spilling coffee on his prints.

“Here’s a man who works everyday, seven days a week, from 4:30 a.m. to 12 noon with the full knowledge that he has been rejected by the world of art,” said Beloff. “He’s very angry. He’s hostile. And he has a right to be.” Beloff puts the analogy this way: “Suppose you spent fifty years of your life becoming the best chef in the world and you cooked the most remarkable meals and every day you cooked and you waited for someone to come in and eat them and no one ever did.”

But Kent, who sleeps in a twin bed in what is essentially a back hallway, keeps sculpting. “He’s smart enough to know that one day his work will be respected as it should be,” said Beloff.

Plastic baby dolls and other objects from popular culture inhabit the studio.

Idealist or Cynic?

Under a metallic lightshade next to his workbench, Kent has thumbtacked a quote in French from Brancusi, written in cursive pencil, which roughly translates: “Don’t look for obscure or mysterious forms; It is pure joy that I give you. Look at them as you like; The closest to God have seen them.”

For most of his career, Kent has been hearing from critics and sycophants, and their palaver has left him bitter and abrasive. “We’re an uncreative, uncultured country,” says Kent, coiled on a stool adjacent to his workbench. “We have contempt for art, and artists. How many artists make a living from their work? Unless you want to be one of these superficial interior decorator types, no one does.”

Kent is either an idealist or a cynic — and at times he is both simultaneously. He spends his mornings chipping away at enormous blocks of wood, turning these coarse leviathans into supple, sensual forms. In the afternoon, he retreats to his narrow living quarters to pump out a Chopin Mazurka or Étude before he pads out to his back porch to read. There, in an oddly cozy room invaded by outdoor vines and protected from the afternoon sun by a dilapidated set of Venetian blinds, sits the book he is currently reading, The Albigensian Crusade, a story of a thirteenth century massacre in southern France. The Middle Ages are his current fascination, mainly because a few years ago he realized it was one of the few periods he knew nothing about.

In his workshop, festooned with chisels and clamps, plastic baby dolls, and withered footballs, hangs a print that Kent made in the 1960s that reads Sunt Lacrimae Rerum, a quote from Lucretius meaning “There are tears for things.” Certainly there could be tears aplenty for Kent. A Kansas City native who came to Yale in the 1930s to study music composition and theory with Paul Hindemith, began sculpting in the late 1940s, purely, he says, by chance.

Initially, his works were in stone, but he soon moved into carving into slate, and those works mix the solemnity of old gravestones with the satire of Mad magazine. As the New York Times wrote, “Though an undeniable anger resides at their heart, they are built to last. Masterfully rendered and highly refined in technique, they smolder with a timeless power, like the satires of Juvenal or Swift, the prints of Daumier or Goya.” The slate works have the quality of fossils; finely chiseled works of organic figures embedded on highly finished onyx-like rock. The monoprints Kent made of them have a biting edge; most were made during the Vietnam War and seethe with contempt at politicians and a society torn asunder by dashed hopes and doublespeak. Many are sexually satirical, like American Victory, a red, white and blue image of a woman carrying her husband’s castrated and winged penis over her head like a heavy weight belt.

There are hundreds of these images stacked against a piece of cardboard, which he used to sell at very low prices. If not for Social Security, he says, he could not make ends meet. But it is not something he is unused to. His artistic ambitions were never acknowledged or embraced. His father was a tool-and-die manufacturer and his mother had a scant education and never learned to drive. Neither understood when he expressed his musical ambitions.

“When I was a child I used to listen to the Metropolitan Opera, when I was fourteen, fifteen years old,” says Kent. “Saturday afternoons. They broadcast even back then. And I couldn’t do it when my father was in the house because he’d say, ‘Turn that garbage off. We don't want to listen to that.’ I got no help from my parents whatsoever. My father said, ‘You don’t need to study that stuff. Just go out and get a good job.’ He was stupid. He was ignorant. He had a fourth grade education. My father was a dummy, really.”

Awe-inspiring Works

Kent threads through the back room that holds most of his large sculptures, crossing his arms across his oxford shirt occasionally and staring at the enormous works. “Sometimes I wonder how the hell I did these things.” That’s part of the mysterious allure of his work. The sculptures are not only jaw-dropping for their workmanship, but awe-inspiring for their execution.

Certain motifs show up frequently, like the carved balls that sit in a chiseled encasement, or the latch links fashioned from different colors and types of wood. The works have a ship-in-a-bottle effect: Was the ball carved first, or last? Was the latch glued or added? In fact, all of these works were carved from a single block of wood. Kent created his own method of fusing different types of wood — poplar, cedar, pine and mahogany — into one large block.

From there, he carves out forms like his latest sculpture, which features a ball resting in a box. On either side are links to buoy-like forms. The links are embellished with artichoke-like ornamentation. The buoys are attached like a latch-and-eye on a door frame. It is such an extravagant and ingenious sculpture that one is apt to wonder what it represents. But to Kent representation is not important. It is the forms he worships and their harmonies he composes.

In that, he is not far from his original love of theory and composition. Just as twentieth century composers said that eggbeaters or lathes could be as musical as pianos or French horns, Kent says that an eggbeater or ladle can serve as an exquisite artistic form. So he bristles when, for instance, one viewer suggested he take his eight-foot anthropomorphic bean sculpture to a restaurant lobby. “Suppose I did a nude woman,” he says. “Would I take her to a local whorehouse and put her in the lobby?” But Kent can only shrug his shoulders in resignation of what he said has become “a backward, dumbed-down culture.”

It has not stopped him from chiseling, clamping, and carving and imagining, breathing in the sweet fog of saw dust. A doctor once asked him what he did. When he told the doctor he carved wood, the doctor seemed pleased that a man of his age could relax with a nice hobby.

“It’s the only activity they can conceive of, you see,” Kent sighed. “The general public is really illiterate.”

— by Tracey O'Shaughnessy. This is an updated version of the article originally published 10 June 2001 in the Republican-American, Waterbury, Connecticut.

New York Times Exhibition Review

How Prints Got an Artist in Hot Water

The last time William Kent, an 81-year-old artist who lives in Durham, exhibited his slate prints in New Haven, it was 1965. The last time Mr. Kent created one of his slate prints -- a process that requires the precision of a sculptor, the strength of a weightlifter, the satiric vision of Jonathan Swift, and the patience of Job -- it was 1977.

The last thing Mr. Kent expected in the year 2000 is that someone -- in New Haven, no less -- would want to exhibit his slate prints, consigned to obscurity beneath dust -- and cobweb-laden tarpaulins in his barn.

That someone is Johnes Ruta, curator for the past 12 years of the eclectic and unusual installations at York Square Cinema in New Haven, one of the state’s best art-house movie theaters. The show, “Carved Wood and Slate Prints by William Kent” opened last week and will run through Oct. 1, 2000.

Mr. Kent’s surprise derives in part from the fact that in the years since 1977 he has turned his promethean energies to wood sculpture and become — in the words of Sandra Swan, a gallery owner in Cape Ann, Mass. — “the greatest living carver of wood in the world; there’s not even anyone close.”

It also derives from the fact that the last time his slate prints were shown in public, all hell broke loose for him in New Haven.

Indeed, because of the fallout from a 1965 exhibition called "Sex and Violence, Or Erotic and Patriotic Prints,” Mr. Kent lost his job as curator at the John Slade Ely House in New Haven. The scandal created by his slate prints coupled with Mr. Kent’s being a thorn in the side of the city’s art establishment — the same year, he led a boycott of Yale-sponsored New Haven Arts Festival — made him persona non grata.

“I really asked for it, didn’t I?'” Mr. Kent said, his laughter bittersweet at the distant memory. '”In 1961, I’d persuaded the Ely House trustees to open their space to artists year round instead of one day a year for the hobbyists in the Paint and Clay Club. I made a professional gallery out of the place.

“But the trustees were retired businesspeople, and some busybody told them I was making dirty pictures in the basement. They believed it. Of course, they never actually saw any of the prints. I stirred up a lot of trouble and it all hit me at once. I was fired. But what could I do? I had no money. I couldn’t fight them.”

What Mr. Kent did was move to Durham, convert a barn into work space and monk-like living quarters, and set to work, seven days a week, for the next 35 years. His surprise at the prints’ resurrection was shared by Mr. Ruta, who’d been led by a Kent admirer to the barn in Durham to see the wood sculpture. Upon entering the barn, though, Mr. Ruta noticed the riveting slate print, Sunt Lacrimae Rerum, a 1966 work created from Colonial-era tombstone rubbings.

“There are tears for things,” Mr. Kent said, translating the Latin inscription. “It was the same when I made it as when Lucretius said it in 200 B.C.”

This giant, elegant print is one of the few the artist has up in his barn, a reminder of his former incarnation as a printmaker. Mr. Ruta asked to see others, and Mr. Kent obliged, pulling aside his mottled tarpaulins. Mr. Ruta was overwhelmed by what he saw, and somewhat saddened that such remarkable work could be out of the public’s view.

“Bill Kent’s slate prints, and his sculpture, for that matter, has been neglected by mainstream galleries,”said Mr. Ruta, who is also an art historian, art consultant for a New York gallery and a community arts activist in New Haven. “Nonetheless, all of his work has strong technical qualities and polish; satiric impact, daring and humor, as well as imaginative insight, compassion and originality.”

Many of the slate prints that got Mr. Kent in hot water 35 years ago will be on display at York Square.

These include The Society for the Abolition of Sex, inspired by a photograph of members of the Society of Colonial Wars in the State of New York (the U.S.A. on their seal, Mr. Kent explained, stands for “United Sex Appeal.”); American Victory, a highly charged work of patriotic eroticism; Come and Take It (Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Leaders of Congress, both based on photographs; Bloody Sword Flag of Texas and First Tri-Color Flag of Texas, two prints inspired by illustrations from a book called Romantic Flags of Texas.

“The bloody sword flag was from 1836, to commemorate the taking of Mexico’s land,” said Mr. Kent. “President Polk did the same thing L.B.J. did in the Gulf of Tonkin, provoking an incident as an excuse to start a war. The history books gloss that over.” Asked for the theme that unites his slate prints, he said, “My outrage is at the politicians and the double talk. It’s still with us today, of course. People have been removed completely from the political process.”

Some of the titles of other prints from the 60s and 70s reveal the artist’s perspective: Society Ladies, My Life Ruined By Sex, Abolish HUAC, Integration (Jackie in Blackface), Smile When You Go Under, Honesty Is the Best Poverty, Yale Go Home, Joe Hill, Brecht, and Portrait of an Artist as Target.

Despite their topicality, the prints are not ephemeral. Though an undeniable anger resides at their heart, they are built to last. Masterfully rendered and highly refined in technique, they smolder with a timeless power, like the satires of Juvenal or Swift, the prints of Daumier or Goya.

As Mr. Ruta put it, Mr. Kent’s slate prints “are provocative, daringly satirical, as historically timely now as when they were produced.”

Mr. Kent started making art in 1949, only after he left Yale, where he had studied music with Paul Hindemith. Mr. Kent began by carving limestone and marble, then moved to small slate flagstones, which he turned into bas-reliefs, with no thought of making prints from them.

The flagstone carvings grew larger, especially after he found a demolition company in West Hartford with a supply of blackboards, three feet by six feet. He went to work in earnest, for the next thirteen years doing little else but making giant slate prints. He carved or sandblasted the images into the surfaces of the 100-pound blackboards, lifted the slates onto a washstand, and applied ink with a brayer. He placed the surface of the print material on the inked slates.

After each print was made, he washed the slate down and did it again, with new colors and new print material. Starting with rice paper, he moved to material that allowed for larger prints — some as tall as seven feet — anything from fabric to pre-printed wallpaper and shower curtains.

“The prints are really monoprints,” he explained. “I never did the normal thing of numbering consecutive editions. Unlike lithographic plates or copper engravings, these slates never deteriorate. You can print tens of thousand without hurting the surface. I don’t remember how many I made of each. I still have 10 or 15 of about 80 different slate prints. I also have all the slates, but I can’t lift them anymore. They’re interesting in themselves, as carved stone bas-reliefs.”

Despite their obscurity now, Mr. Kent’s slate prints were well-received in New York’s art circles in the beginning.

His ethereal work Leave the Moon Alone was included in the 1966 Whitney Annual Show, hung alongside prints by Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, and Robert Motherwell. He had a dealer, his work was included in scholarly art tomes, and earned friendly notices from The Herald Tribune (“large, highly amusing and inventive prints that look like Pop posters but really go deeper in their social significance and satiric overtones”) and other newspapers.

He seemed poised to enter the upper echelon of American artists, those whose works were purchased by museums, institutions, and collectors.

But by 1977, Mr. Kent stopped making slate prints. “After 13 years, and hundreds of these prints, I was tired. I had done what I set out to do,” he said. But the full truth was that he had found another medium: wood.

Mr. Ruta’s recent interest in the slate prints has sparked the artist’s reconsideration of these old works.

“The prints I made in the 1960s,” Mr. Kent said, “still seem relevant to me, and that’s why I think the art is good. People didn’t understand satire then. They still don’t. They don’t understand the difference between erotic and pornographic, either. But the sources of my inspiration go back to 530 B.C., to Greek and Roman culture. Of course, these same people would say the classic erotic art was dirty, too.”

He paused and added, with some satisfaction, “This show has real punch to it. It’s not just pretty pictures. I can’t believe no one has shown these prints since I was fired. I’m glad Johnes wants to show them, but can he really get away with it?”

— This article by Alan Bisbort was originally published 3 September 2000 in The New York Times.